The Whicker, Man: Halloween Challenge Night 13

The UK horror experience fascinates me. For something as homegrown and ready-loaded with a ready arsenal of classic, gothic literature and a hefty output of the Hammer and Amicus Studios in the 60s and 70s, it feels as though British horror often gets overlooked in favour of its glitzier, more camera-ready US cousin, with its Universal Monsters, serial killers, Munsters and Addamses. There’s a charisma to American horror that’s sometimes lacking in the older, colder, damper, camper British version. And yet, consumers of the form overlook Britshock at their peril, because beyond the celebrated works of Stoker, Shelley, Cushing and Lee there’s an intriguing domestic oeuvre in UK horror that has a taste all of its own. A rare vintage, redolent of wet post War Victorian townhouses, urban cemeteries, canals, shadows, Scream comics, House of Hammer series, and guilty tattered paperback dreadfuls passed under school desks by day, to be consumed in secret after sunset.

I go on – and could easily continue to, but suffice it to say, British horror – even in the early decades of my long life, is a broad church, as evidenced by Alan Whicker’s exploration of the British Horror psyche here, on the cusp of a new era of visual nasties...

 Whicker’s World: A Handful of Horrors: I Don’t Like My Monsters to have Oedipus Complexes (1968)

This is once over lightly stuff, but intriguing for its scattershot skimming of what makes for British horror in the day – horror magazines, low budget schlockers, a distracted interview with scream queen Barbara Shelley, an earnest but wired Screaming Lord Sutch, Christopher Lee, Terry Nation and his Dalek creations, and our oh-so-lampoonable host drifting through Highgate Cemetery, pursued by a Yeti. It’s all good, it’s all valid, it’s all there – bumping its ugly bits together in a mash-mash stitched-together way. Reminiscent of… I don’t know what.

Horror essentially defies codification, which is part of its character and an essential element of its perennial appeal, so a single episode doco is never going to do it justice – even if geographically contained. Heck, subsequent documentary series have covered literature and film and still not scratched the surface, but that just means that there’s more to discover, to experience, to appreciate and argue over.

YouTube option:



Halloweenometer: Your mileage may vary, as it should. Trust me, it’s better that way.

Companion Piece: I nearly did Lord Sutch's 'Jack the Ripper', but opted for something a little more catchy and... comic. Here's the Damned!

Real Awful: Halloween Challenge Night 3

Tonight we watched some reality TV. I mean a documentary kind of thing. About Amityville, surely THE 1970s haunted house story, and an event that inspired a book, a movie, some more movies (including remakes) and probably launched a whole swag of paranormal documentaries, including this one.

Shock Docs: Amityville Horror House (2020)

Halloweenometer? We didn't finish it. This is the second in a row ! What's going on?

Mrs Simian only had a passing knowledge of the Amityville story (fair enough), and no knowledge of the preceding DeFeo family murders, which this documentary took sometime in setting up as a backdrop to the story. So, it's a true crime story from the outset, with mugshots, confessional tapes, forensic photos - so far, not really Halloweeny. It was lurid, it was at pains to reproduce a grimy, nicotine-coloured version of the Seventies (good!) But we didn't finish it. The real-life murders cast a pall over any promised spooky ookiness, and so we turned to something else instead. Bah.

Now, I'm not opposed to documentaries, and spooky documentaries, and even 70s flavoured documentaries. Gimme some of those Ghost Hunters - brilliant! And to be fair, the modern streamers do produce a shedload of paranormal-adjacent 'reality' content. Most of it is ridiculously hysterical bobbins, but some I find good. I may be alone in really liking the atmospheric and more leisurely Files of the Unexplained (especially the episode on Myrtle Plantation). But this wasn't it.

No score on the Halloweenometer. We really disliked the voyeuristic over the top aspect of this. It's not our Halloween, But I have a good feeling about some stuff coming up, so stick around!

Companion Piece

Not that it deserves company, let's have a haunted house song, this time inspired by The Shining and provided by Ms Bush just one album before The Hounds of Love (ooh - with a sample from Night of the Demon!) Here's the rather bonkers Get Out of My House:

Eey-oorr!!

The Other Side (of the Ditch): Halloween Challenge Night 2

 Welcome back to my nightmare. On the second night of October Mrs Simian and I ventured into the murky depths of some of our free Aussie streamers available through our public library. Beamafilm and Kanopy can be accessed for a limited number of views per month as 'tickets', and offer an interesting range of documentaries, TV series, movies and short form progamming. As you'd expect, there's a heavy Australian bias (as there is in another free channel, Brollie), but that inevitably also means some NZ content gets thrown in, because... our sunburned cousins do me like that.

So tonight's viewing was a documentary, The Darkside. Gorillamydreams is a bigly fan of supernatural reality slop like Finding Bigfoot (they haven't), Expedition X (not ex-enough, frankly), and Scared Stupid. I may have made one of those up. The Darkside is a bit less tongue in cheek, and purports to retell real-life eerie stories with the help of Australian actors (Deborah Mailman, Claudia Karvan, Bryan Brown, Jack Charles, among others) usually straight to camera with some landscapiness thrown in, and sometimes with their own craft helping to interpret things. 

The Darkside (Warwick Thornton, 2013)

The tales in The Darkside are very much Australian stories, with a strong sense of location and history, and told largely from a First Nations perspective, as you would expect from Thornton's body of work (Samson & Delilah being the one I am most familiar with). The stories drift in and out, not linking with one another, nor presenting a throughline, but lingering in places wit some arresting images - a painting of a girl which turns into a landscape, and then back to a girl, stretches of slow camera tracks through dim museum corridors, mist coming in with the tide, and the unflinching stare of the narrators as they tell their stories straight down the barrel. 

So onto the Halloweenometer: I can barely rate this one. We didn't finish it, although I may return. It's eerie, and unsettling in places - but it's not what I'm after for a Halloween watch, and I imagine that Halloween traffic is not what this movie is looking for. The most affecting story - and our checking out point was among those corridors of the Australian National Archive, and the stories of remains of indigenous peoples, inspected, prodded, measured, tested and examined and othered by a white scientists and physicians, reducing them to museum exhibits and dusty remains in indexed boxes.  Genuinely unnerving, confronting and grim. Stories deserving to be told and remembered, but not in this context.